On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 1:00 AM, Dick Roth <raroth7 at comcast.net> wrote: > I've been having a problem for a while: when booting, >haldaemon will > fail, leaving me without CD/DVD and >floppy drives available. > > Has anyone else had this kind of problem? If so, can >anyone suggest a > solution? Your problem may not be with HAL. I have had similar, intermittent problems, recently, with various symptoms, including that K3b could not find my CD-RW drive or media in it. I just finished writing to CD-R media with K3b with that CD-RW drive. In the case of my Desktop, I now know that the motherboard is damaged. Since you wrote that you have a problem with more than one piece of HW, I hope in your case it isn't the motherboard. You can run Diagnostics on the HW, which I did last Sunday, with the Dell Diagnostics for this box, but my HW got a clean bill of health, since it is intermittent. GL!